Half a Hundred Acre Wood

Christian homeschooling integrating Classical and Charlotte Mason principles

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Just thought I’d give a glimpse at what life has ACTUALLY been like for Week #1.  This is just to prove that we don’t actually do all the stuff we plan because sometimes… life just is not so utopian.

On Monday I was wildly racing to prepare for my first day of class (which was Tuesday).  To add a little spice to my already frantic pace, a drilling rig showed up to drill three holes about 10 feet from the house for the installation of a geothermal unit.

That thing has been, by far, the loudest thing I have EVER tried to teach through….

By Wednesday we not only had a drilling rig and huge trench in our front yard…

but we also had a backhoe loader tearing apart our patio and digging a huge hole in our backyard.

 

For some reason, my plans didn’t happen exactly as scheduled.

So, what did we ACTUALLY do?

  • Completed Saxon Math Lessons 4-7 (Saxon Math 5/4 & Saxon Math 1)
  • Memorized first week of memory work & practiced tracing USA border
  • Memorized a 112 Sentence Classifications Chart
  • Started memorizing “banned words” list
  • Wrote IEW “America” poem using quality adjectives
  • Practiced IEW week 1 vocabulary cards
  • Spelling lesson (Rod & Staff)
  • Completed State coloring pages .  We also have several Highlights Which Way USA books that we’ve been using as we study the states.
  • Placed Columbus on our timeline notebook. (We will likely also post these on our wall timeline, but because we’ve had to take some of it down, we haven’t tackled it just yet.)

 

 

 

Notice how only one child seems to be working on this stuff…
  • Created a ship mosaic (I highly recommend never spending $10 on a foam mosaic that contains 10,000 pieces.  Please, for your own sanity, DO NOT DO THIS.)

 

This thing calls for three layers, but we stopped as soon as it resembled a ship.
And here are the left over pieces…

Now, the funniest thing about that project?  It’s now glued to the table.  I can’t get it off without all the pieces popping back off.  AAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!

  • Finished some activities from the Christopher Columbus Activity Book that we purchased when we visited The Nina last year
  • Played the Columbian Exchange game
  • A Columbus Mini-Book that provides room for children to illustrate.
  • From The Children’s Treasury of Virtues, “Sail On! Sail On!” by Joaquin Miller (pg 148).  You can also listen to this at Librivox.
  • Compare Christopher Columbus maps to present day.
  • Santa Maria cut-and-paste activity from Evan-Moor
  • Reviewed the Columbus Lapbook we completed last year.
  • Intro to cursive
  • Copywork pages of name and address (David)
  • Started Attitude of Gratitude Unit study – Lessons 1-4 (because we are not ready just yet for BOV project).  I am also reading One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp and creating my own gratitude journal.
  • Listen to American History Stories through Exploration.
  • Create Human Body Lapbook.  We finished the entire lapbook on Monday because we had family presentations this week, where we demonstrated how to create a lapbook because we enjoy them so much as a family.
Human Body Lapbook

And Gary, of course, taught them all they wanted to know about drilling rigs, bentonite mud, drill bits, mud pumps, and derricks.

The rest of the time we stared out the window.

So what did we NOT get around to doing?

  • Drawing practice (though we practiced drawing A LOT this summer.  And, by the way, just now I used a word that’s on our banned word list.)

What happens when we don’t finish what we planned?

We first re-evaluate if it was necessary or beneficial to begin with. (BP called it “Value-added.”)  If it is, and, if it doesn’t work in well with any other point in the school year, we save it back for either:

  • the break between semester 1 and 2 (November/December)
  • the end of the year when our homeschool group is not in session (April/May)
  • summer school

So, there you have it.  No, we didn’t complete all we planned to accomplish.  But that doesn’t bother me.  The cool thing is, we accomplished something this week in the midst of chaos.  If I hadn’t planned for all of this, I think all we would have done this week was stare out the window…

By the way, if you’re wondering how I even REMEMBER to do this stuff, go to our previous post on how we organize our file system.  Without my folder system, I really would forget EVERYTHING (because that’s REALITY for us!).


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